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Dessert

Cocoa Cake

A simple baked cake made with flour, cocoa, butter, sugar, sultanas, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Cocoa Cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. In a bowl, mix the baking powder, cocoa, and flour.

  3. Rub in the butter until well combined.

Make the batter

  1. Add the sultanas and sugar, then moisten the mixture with about ½ cup of water.

  2. Pour the batter into a buttered cake tin.

Bake

  1. Bake in the preheated oven for about 1 hour.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Butter + cocoatop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together548 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-undecalactone (coconut, creamy).

  4. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Flour + cocoatop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together386 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Flour
Forms the main structure of the cake as its proteins set during baking.
Butter
Rubbed into the flour to tenderise the crumb and carry flavour.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, helping the cake rise.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cake brown and stay moist.
Concentrated cocoa
Gives the cake its chocolate flavour and dark colour.
Sultanas
Add pockets of chewy sweetness throughout the cake.

The step that matters

Moistening the mixture with water. Add the water gradually and stop once the mixture is evenly moist. Too much liquid makes the crumb dense and gummy, while too little leaves the cake dry and crumbly, because flour absorbs water and its texture depends on that balance.

Swap the cocoa

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, sugar):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Macadamia nutfits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Cocoathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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